Our fundraising efforts have helped to open countless exhibits over the history of the museum.

Current Exhibits

  • The Louisiana Museum Foundation collaborated with the Louisiana State Museum to create Marking Pictures: the Life and Work of Clementine Hunter. This exhibition explored the life and work of Clementine Hunter, one of the most important self-taught American artists of the twentieth century. Hunter, who referred to painting as “marking,” produced thousands of images drawn from her experiences working and living on Melrose Plantation in Louisiana’s Cane River region. More than fifty artworks from the Louisiana State Museum collection, including one of the artist’s coveted quilts, were on display.

    While Hunter is best-known for her idyllic representations of African American and Creole life in rural Louisiana, this exhibit also featured several rarely seen abstract images she painted in the early 1960s. It also included one of the many forgeries inspired by the increasing popularity of her work.

  • Living with Hurricanes tells the story of rescue, rebuilding and renewal. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans’ badly engineered levee system, it resulted in one of the worst disasters in American history, leaving 80 percent of the city flooded and hundreds dead.

    This exhibit documents the event, the aftermath and southeast Louisiana’s ongoing recovery. With interactive exhibits and artifacts that showcase the spirit of the city’s residents, this is a collection you don’t want to miss.

Previous Exhibits

  • The Louisiana State Museum worked in collaboration with the renowned Musée du Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac in Paris to produce the exhibition, Mystery in Motion: African American Masking and Spirituality in Mardi Gras. This exhibition examined the direct influence of multicultural spirituality within the carnival traditions of Black New Orleanians. The exhibit was on display from February 13, 2021, through November 28, 2021 and served as the centerpiece of the museum's planned programming to celebrate the 2021 carnival season.

    Mystery in Motion guest curators Kim Vaz-Deville, Ph.D., and Ron Bechet of Xavier University of Louisiana explored spirituality in Mardi Gras through the presentation of more than two dozen Black masking Indian suits, carnival costumes, and masking objects produced in New Orleans, juxtaposed with extraordinary African artifacts that are representative of the cultures, religions, and artistry that influenced their creation. These exceptional African objects were on loan from the collections of the Musée du Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac and Southern University at New Orleans.

  • Louisiana Museum Foundation & Louisiana State Museum presented the Baroness Pontalba and the Rise of Jackson Square Exhibit. The exhibit opened to the public Sunday December 2nd, 2018. The Louisiana Museum Foundation celebrated the closing tricentennial events at the Cabildo as the Louisiana State Museum featured the 18th-century New Orleans philanthropist, Don Andrés Almonester and his daughter, Micaela Almonester, Baroness de Pontalba. Jackson Square can be credited to two individuals: the Baroness, for her namesake apartments, and her generous father for rebuilding the Cabildo, Presbytere, and St. Louis Cathedral after the 1788 fire. The Baroness de Pontalba was also instrumental in transforming the muddy military parade ground, once known as the Place d’Armes, into the beautiful Jackson Square, which is to this day the most iconic and visited part of Louisiana.

    The exhibition featured family treasures, publicly exhibited for the first time from the family’s ancestral château located about forty miles north of Paris. Guests viewed Micaela’s official portrait from the Chateau, 19th-century Odiot silver, crystal, bronze doré objects, and white and gold Sèvres porcelain, all displaying the Almonester-Pontalba family crest, and elaborately scripted family initials similar to the monogram that adorns the cast-iron balustrades on the galleries of our Pontalba Buildings.

  • Louisiana Museum Foundation’s celebrated the first tricentennial event in 2018 with the opening of Recovered Memories. Organized by Iberdrola in association with the Louisiana State Museum, a magnificent 7,000 square foot exhibition featured hundreds of historic artifacts, documents, costumes and works of art from Spanish and U.S. museums, archives and private collections. The exhibit shared Spain’s influence on the development of New Orleans and contribution to the founding of our country, in the building that once served as the seat of Spanish Colonial Louisiana.

  • Treasures of Napoléon offered visitors an amazing opportunity to see beyond the myth of Napoléon Bonaparte from April to August 2008. It was one of a series of traveling exhibitions that the state museum presented at the Old U.S. Mint.

  • Living with Hurricanes tells the story of rescue, rebuilding and renewal. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans’ badly engineered levee system, it resulted in one of the worst disasters in American history, leaving 80 percent of the city flooded and hundreds dead.

    This exhibit documents the event, the aftermath and southeast Louisiana’s ongoing recovery. With interactive exhibits and artifacts that showcase the spirit of the city’s residents, this is a collection you don’t want to miss.

  • Clementine Hunter: Plantation Life was a comprehensive exhibition held at the Wedell-Williams Aviation and Cypress Sawmill Museum.  The exhibition ran from October 1, 2015 to April 30, 2016 and showcased more than 60 paintings and other decorated objects. It was one of the largest exhibitions of her work in recent years and presented Hunter’s intimate views of plantation life, the daily rhythms of domestic and agricultural work punctuated by memorable occasions like marriage, funeral, the birth of a child, or fishing trips on Cane River.